1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to the flora industry. More particularly, this invention pertains to the field of processes for making artificial flora, such as artificial trees like the Ficus tree, and to a unique process of making them inexpensively, from readily available materials, to form a safe, easy-to-ship product.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The use of flora, such as plants, flowers, bushes, and the like, has been an American tradition for many, many years. It has even extended from exterior the home or office to inside those places and now occupies a rather large portion of personal decoration to one's living as well as working space. Many of these natural plants and such have been specially developed to withstand the rigors of inhospitable weather climates as well as smokey or other polluted conditions found inside the work place and home and wet, smog-filled conditions near certain factories and in some towns.
There are, however, many places, including climates, that are inhospitable to such flora and, in those areas, the only decorative flora that will last any reasonable time are artificial plants and flowers. Thus, a large industry has emerged where the same natural decorative flowers, plants and bushes are made artificially from plastics and the like such that they can adorn homes and offices where otherwise no such flora could flourish. The processes for making these artificial flora are many and varied and, in many cases, become very expensive as the detail needed to simulate real flora requires more and more manual effort.
For instance, certain flowers have straight, smooth-surfaced stems with flat leaves with a flower located on each stem. With these flowers, one only has to make straight stem pieces, flat leaves and single flowers and assemble them in appropriate fashion. However, other flora, such as the Ficus tree, has a rough-surfaced, main trunk with numerous narrow-diameter rough-surface vines entangled about the trunk and each other with "wavy" leaves and few, if any, flowers. These trees are almost impossible to make artificially, not only because of the weave of the vines about the central trunk, but because of the roughness of the bark that covers the trunk and vines. To make such a tree requires extreme amounts of manual effort thus producing an artificial tree with a large selling price; so large, in fact, that in many cases it is cheaper to use real Ficus trees and replace them with new real Ficus trees as the existing trees die from the inelement environment surrounding the tree.